Women, feminism, and geek culture

The decline and fall of the Linkspam Empire (16 July 2013)

The risk in speaking up | ashe dryden: “This post has been a long time coming; with each incident the feelings of frustration, sadness, and anger swell up again. The energy I and others have to explain the complexity of these issues gets quickly depleted dealing with the same reactions each time. I’m writing this to help you understand a little about what it’s like to speak up as well as the kinds of responses we hope to get when we do.”

Gender and Digital Identity | thewikiman: “I’d like to see Higher Education Institutions tackling this by preparing academics and researchers (both male and female) for what will happen if they become prominent. I’d like to see students being taught about the scale of the problem as soon as they engage with the online world. … But even tackling this problem head-on is fraught with difficulty – as someone on the panel pointed out, this has the feeling of acceptance: getting abuse is part of being a successful female, so here’s some coping strategies, off you go.”

On “On Women In Tech” | Deciphering Glyph: “I hope that in the future, Lea, and others who agree with her, will take some time to dig deeper into the realities of the women-in-tech movement, and perhaps work with those already in said movement to provide better answers to these questions. It seems to me that there’s more agreement than disagreement here, and that much of what she dislikes is a caricature of the movement, not its essence.”

Sierra takes TechCrunch to task | Open Codex: “The whole comment is worth a read, and I thought I’d publish and excerpt from the book I’m working on now entitledComment: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators in the Age of the Web about Sierra’s experience.”

Out of the cage. | hacklikeagirl: “I’m coming out of this cage, in part, because I’m doing more work around transwomen’s issues, specifically, utilizing open source to get more transwomen into economically sustainable fields. I will be doing this work, in my spare time, under my own name, working with other transwomen in the tech sector to provide training and mentorship programs to this community in order to improve employment opportunities.”

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).